New CMS management

Joe Incandela — CMS Spokesperson

Joe Incandela is a professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His PhD under H. Frisch (Chicago) involved development and use of large area superconducting monopole detectors. His thesis experiment had ~200 times the sensitivity of the Stanford experiment that reported a candidate monopole signal a year or two earlier.

Joe switched to colliders in the ’80s as a CERN Fellow on UA2 studying W and Z bosons (pre-LEP), then joined INFN Milano to search for charged Higgs bosons. In the ’90s he was at Fermilab, where he led several CDF Si detector projects and co-led the search for top with lifetime b-tagging that produced a first observation. In 2001 he joined UCSB and led the US CMS Tracker group involved in the TOB and TEC projects.

Joe is the fourth CMS Spokesperson, following Michel Della Negra, Jim Virdee and Guido Tonelli, and he hopes to tap into their collective experience and expertise: “My predecessors have done everything they could in the interest of CMS. They have a lot of good ideas and a lot of history. I will try to draw on this as much as I can.”

The coming two years will be divided into two main spheres of activity for CMS: before the 18-month Long Shutdown to upgrade the detector for new conditions expected from 2014, CMS will spend 2012 collecting collision data from the LHC at possibly a higher energy than before. Joe states: “We have very good reasons to expect major results. It is a very exciting time, but it is also going to be a very intense time.”

Tiziano Camporesi — Deputy Spokesperson

Tiziano began his HEP career with the CERN NA4 experiment, graduating from Bologna University in 1981. Since then he has worked on the MAC experiment at PEP (SLAC) and DELPHI (LEP). At DELPHI, he went from construction of the electromagnetic calorimeter and luminosity monitors, through responsibilities for the central DAQ and data quality monitoring, to becoming Spokesman in 2000. Tiziano was also the LEP Physics Coordinator in 1994-1995 and convened the analysis team that delivered the LEP energy files for the Z0 scan.

He has been a CERN staff member since 1986. In addition to his physics duties, Tiziano has also served on several internal committees and tasks: organiser of EP seminars, secretary of the computing committee FOCUS, chair of the Long Term Contract Board, member of the technical and doctoral students committee, Chair of the Equal Opportunity Advisory Panel, member of the CERN fellowship committee. As part of the non-member state relation team, Tiziano was responsible, until 2009, for relations with China and Korea.

He joined CMS in 2001 and became manager of the HF project until 2003 when he joined the ECAL collaboration as Technical Coordinator. He became CMS Commissioning and Run Coordinator in 2007 and kept this role throughout the first two years of data-taking.

As Deputy Spokesperson, Tiziano will share with Joao the tasks to facilitate communication between the CMS communities and with the HEP world at large. The first challenges to be faced are the ones posed by the ambitious LHC programme. With Joe and Joao, he is involved in the preparation of the 2012 physics campaign, working closely with the various coordination areas.

Joao Varela — Deputy Spokesperson

Joao Varela is a professor in the Physics Department of IST, Technical University of Lisbon. He carried out his PhD under R. Salmeron at Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau with work in the NA10 experiment at CERN’s SPS, dedicated to Drell-Yan dimuon production in hadronic collisions. In mid-’80s he participated in the creation of LIP, the Portuguese laboratory for particle physics, where he served as co-director until mid-’90s. During this period he led the LIP groups in the NA38 and NA50 experiments (heavy-ion collisions at SPS) and in the DELPHI experiment at LEP, where he coordinated several projects in trigger and data acquisition.

In 1992 he joined CMS taking interested in the development of the electromagnetic calorimeter and the trigger system. He was involved in the design and technology choices of the ECAL detector, front-end read-out and trigger. For a period in the ’90s he was a CERN physicist and since then he has been based at CERN. He assumed several coordination roles in CMS, in particular as the L1 Trigger project manager, the CMS detector controls coordinator, resources manager of the Trigger/DAQ project and conferences committee chairperson.

As Deputy Spokesperson along with Tiziano Camporesi he will assist the spokesperson in the preparations for the very important data taking period this year, where high pileup will raise a new set of challenges, and in the production of the best possible physics results at 8 TeV, hopefully leading to major discoveries in physics. In parallel he will help on planning the upgrade of the CMS detector during the first long shutdown paving the road to a powerful detector running at nominal LHC energy and luminosity.

Greg Landsberg — Physics Coordinator

Greg Landsberg is a professor of Physics at Brown University, USA. He received his PhD in 1995 under Paul Grannis (SUNY at Stony Brook) based on the search for anomalous tri-linear couplings in Zγ production at the D0 experiment at Fermilab’s Tevatron. He continued his work on D0 as a Fermilab postdoc in 1995-1998 and joined Brown University’s faculty in 1998. In D0 he led searches for new physics, serving as a convener of the New Phenomena group and later as Deputy Physics Coordinator. His group contributed to the assembly and commissioning of the silicon vertex detector for the D0 upgrade.

The Brown University group joined CMS in 2004 under Greg’s leadership. He worked on the Tracker Outer Barrel assembly and commissioning, HCAL L1 trigger and HLT, MET reconstruction, and most recently served as a convener for the CMS Exotica Group (2009-2010). He has led a number of physics analyses in CMS, including CMS’s first search for black holes.

Greg will serve as CMS Physics Coordinator in 2012-2013. The wealth of data to be accumulated in 2012 will provide an opportunity to maximise the physics output of the CMS Collaboration, both in searches for new particles and phenomena (including the Higgs boson and Supersymmetry) and in precision measurements.

Maria Chamizo-Llatas — Run Coordinator

Maria started her research in HEP at the L3 experiment at LEP, where she did her PhD on b-physics, developing software tools for b-tagging and the measurement of Rb. She also did the measurement of the W mass at L3 and was member of the LEP WW working group to provide final results combining the data from all LEP experiments.

She joined ATLAS in 2002 and was responsible for the production of the endcap silicon modules made at the University of Geneva. She had a leading role in the commissioning of the ATLAS SCT and was responsible for the monitoring of the environmental conditions.

Maria joined CMS in 2005 were she was responsible for the certification of the CMS barrel muon chambers that were built in Italy, Germany and Spain and sent to CERN for the acceptance tests and to be equipped with the final electronics before installation in the CMS wheels. She had a leading role in the integration and commissioning of CMS and was Deputy Run Coordinator in 2011.

As Run Coordinator, she will work very closely with the Trigger, DAQ, sub-detectors, Offline, Technical Coordination and LHC teams to ensure the smooth operation of CMS and to get the highest quality of the data in the very challenging pile-up conditions that we will have in 2012. She will also coordinate the commissioning of CMS during the first year of the Long Shutdown.

Paris Sphicas — Publications Committee Chair

Paris Sphicas is a senior CERN staff physicist and professor at the University of Athens, Greece. He obtained his PhD on the UA1 experiment, studying multi-jet production and searching for new resonances decaying to jets in proton-antiproton collisions. After his PhD, he stayed with UA1 for two more years, as a CERN scientific associate, working on Bottom and Top production. He then moved to Fermilab as a Wilson fellow, joining the CDF experiment. In 1991, he joined the faculty at MIT as assistant professor, becoming a professor in 1997.

Paris joined CMS in 1994, along with the first wave of US institutions, initially working on the development of the DAQ and High-Level trigger, and then moving onto the creation of the software and physics groups (Physics Reconstruction and Selection). Later, he joined CERN and withdrew from CDF to concentrate fully on CMS (he also left MIT in 2002, taking on a professorship at the University of Athens in the same year). He has since served as manager of the PRS project in 2001-2004, the CPT project in 2005-2006, and finally as Physics Coordinator in 2007-2009. He has been active in searches for Supersymmetry.

His current job is to coordinate the production and scrutiny of all CMS publications in refereed scientific journals, as chair of the Publications Committee (PubComm).

Roberto Carlin — Trigger Coordinator

Roberto is a professor of Physics at the University of Padova, teaching electromagnetism for engineers and particle detectors for undergraduate physics.

Roberto started his career in 1982 as an undergraduate student at CERN, working on a wire chamber detector for the PS170 experiment, designed to study the proton form factors at LEAR. Later, as a PhD student, he joined the FENICE experiment at ADONE in Frascati, to study the neutron form factors. After graduating, Roberto moved to ZEUS at HERA, developing the detectors for the muon system as well as their trigger and readout electronics. He then served as technical coordinator of the barrel muon detector, coordinator of its trigger and later of the global ZEUS trigger. From 1998 Roberto was project manager of the new silicon detector being built for the ZEUS upgrade, and then Deputy Spokesperson of the experiment between 2003 and 2005. In 2005 Roberto moved to CMS, to serve from 2009 as Commissioning Coordinator and later Deputy Project Manager of the Drift Tubes muon detector.

In 2012, Roberto joins the CMS Trigger Study Group as the Trigger Coordinator, initially sharing the task with the previous coordinator Wesley Smith. The challenges facing the group involve keeping the Trigger running at optimal levels with the high intensities of the beams, especially with a larger pile-up than CMS was designed for. At the same time, the Trigger Study Group will have to start the preparation for the new conditions of higher energies and higher luminosity that LHC will provide in 2014, making sure that expertise accumulated so far is carried over through the Long Shutdown.

Lucia Silvestris — PPD Coordinator

Lucia Silvestris is a senior INFN staff physicist in Bari and leads the CMS-Bari team. She is the CMS Physics Performance and Dataset (PPD) Coordinator.

Lucia began her HEP career with the CERN ALEPH experiment writing her PhD thesis on the precision measurements of Z boson mass and the determination of the number of light neutrino families. She held specific responsibilities in the Simulation and Online projects of the ALEPH HCAL detector, and coordinated detector performance analyses of the vertex detector upgrade.

Lucia joined the CMS Tracker project in 1995 and coordinated the online and offline analysis for the Tracker test-beam. In 2001 she was nominated as PRS Tracker b-tau coordinator. In 2002-2005 she served as deputy chair of the CMS Conference Committee. Starting from March 2005, she became Software co-coordinator. In 2007-2009 she was deputy Offline Coordinator and served as Offline Coordinator in 2010-2011.

Physics Performance and Dataset

The role of PPD is to ensure the quality of the data used by the different physics analysis groups. The PPD team will work with Physics to develop physics code performance and will be responsible for the validation of the physics performance of this code in generators, simulation, reconstruction, alignment and calibration, Data Quality Monitoring, analysis and statistics tools, as well as the trigger validation. The main deliverables of the PPD will be the sign-offs of the CMSSW production releases via the usual pre-production physics validation samples, stating that they are ready for deployment for MC production, prompt reconstruction, or reprocessing of data.

New PAG: Standard Model Physics

In 2012, CMS welcomed a new Physics Analysis Group called Standard Model Physics (SMP). This group was formed by merging the Electroweak (EWK) group with the high-PT subset of the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) group. According to Kostas Kousouris, one of the conveners of this nascent group, the reasons for doing so were both practical and based on the physics needs of the collaboration.

“In terms of physics,” he says, “we have reached the level of precision in our measurements where we need to have a global view.” For example, there are certain measurements that were formerly performed by different groups: “Z+jet final states belonged to the EWK side, while photon+jet events belonged to the QCD side,” adds Kostas. Above a certain transverse momentum, photons and Z bosons behave more and more alike, and the associated production of jets probes the same QCD aspects. It therefore made sense to have both studies as part of the same physics group, studying Standard Model processes.

An understanding of these processes is crucial as it is beneficial in many ways: in commissioning the CMS detector, in tuning the Monte Carlo simulations, as well as in studying the important backgrounds for the searches for new physics. In addition, CMS is able to perform competitive measurements of known Standard Model processes in an entirely new energy regime, and a large community of physicists is interested in these results.

The functions of the EWK and high-PT QCD groups were once performed by the same group, until it was split before the LHC began collisions. “This [splitting the group] made sense back then in view of the first data we collected, but there is no good reason to sustain it,” says Kostas. In addition, both groups — EWK and QCD — had diminishing manpower since 2010, which made co-ordination with other groups (Trigger, Monte Carlo, physics analysis) increasingly difficult. The formation of the new group both achieves a larger scope and ensures that all of the activities can be conducted in a smooth way.